Science Blog -- Richardson and Lee honored by friends and colleagues

Richardson and Lee honored by friends and colleagues

Winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics, professors Robert C. Richardson, right, and David M. Lee, toast each other at a celebration in their honor in Clark Hall last Thursday. All photographs by Robert Barker, Cornell University Photography

Background on the discovery
Nobel laureates: federal funding is crucial
Reactions to the announcement
How winners are chosen
Cornell's Nobel laureates

By Larry Bernard

Faced with hundreds of e-mail messages, "in" boxes overflowing with congratulatory messages from all over the world, telephones ringing off the hook with calls from reporters, producers, former students and colleagues, Cornell's two newest Nobel laureates took time to be feted by their own department last Thursday.

David M. Lee, professor of physics, and Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics, who share the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics with their former doctoral student, Douglas Osheroff, were the subjects of considerable accolades and entertainment at the top of the Clark Hall of Science, home of the physics department and its Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students and university administrators enjoyed Swedish meatballs and other fare while honoring the physicists who learned a day earlier that they had won the Nobel Prize for a discovery they made 25 years earlier.

"This continues a very great tradition in the physics department," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings, with Richardson and Lee grinning at the side of the assembled throng. The pair, Rawlings said, illustrate "the highest standards of teaching and research" that mark the department.

The universal response among colleagues was: "It's about time; what took them so long?" when commenting on the Nobel committee's selection. N. David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics, had nominated the trio to the Nobel committee three times in the past 15 years -- in 1983, 1988 and 1993. Dozens of other distinguished scientists, invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, had nominated them for the discovery as well.

On Oct. 9, three years after the last nomination letter and 30 years to the week after Richardson began teaching here, the Nobel came to the trio. And the party was the cap on a whirlwind 36 hours for the Cornell pair, that began with early morning phone calls the day before.

Lee didn't have to be awakened on Wednesday morning; he already was awake doing exercises for a bad back when the phone rang at about 5:30 a.m..

"There was a very nice man from Sweden on the line, and he told me the news, and then another nice man who is on the Nobel committee, whose name I recognized, got on the line, and I knew it wasn't a prank," Lee said. "When I got off I went in to my wife, who was still asleep, and I said, 'Did you hear the phone ring?' She said yes, she had heard it, and I said, 'Good, then I wasn't dreaming."

Then the phone kept ringing for the next two hours as reporters learned of the prize. Lee made it to campus just a touch late to teach his 8 a.m. class, a freshman and sophomore physics section.

"Just a minute while I finish getting dressed," he told the students as he tucked in his shirt. After explaining why there were photographers and others in the room, he discarded his lesson plan and spent the session describing his discovery of the superfluidity of helium-3, the find that the Nobel committee had cited as a major breakthrough in low-temperature physics. Then Lee spent the morning doing telephone interviews and posing for photographs in the laboratory in the Clark Hall basement where the discovery was made.

President Hunter Rawlings, right, congratulates Robert Richardson at a party in Clark Hall Oct. 10 honoring Richardson and David Lee for winning the 1996 Nobel prize in physics.

Richardson was in Washington, D.C., for a condensed matter physics meeting of the National Research Council that morning. But his wife, Betty, a physics lecturer at Cornell, got the news at home in Ithaca first and then had a difficult time reaching her husband.

"I got a phone call from Sweden. He said, 'I have urgent news, but I guess we can tell you,'" she said. She gave the caller the phone number for her husband's hotel in Washington.

"I called our daughter, and she said, 'Did you call Daddy yet?' I said no, I was waiting for Sweden to call him. It was a very exciting morning," Betty Richardson said.

By that time, Richardson had received the call in his hotel room.

"My first thought was that something bad happened; you don't really get good news in the middle of the night," Richardson said. "It must have been three or four sentences before I realized what he was saying. I tried calling Betty for the next hour. She had left a message with the front desk clerk saying congratulations. He said, 'what for, did he win the lottery?' She said no, the Nobel Prize. He said, 'What's that?'"

A common reaction among those on campus was that it could not have happened to two nicer gentlemen, or any better scientists.

"I couldn't imagine a better Nobel Prize," said Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus and former physics department chairman who hired Lee in 1958. "You richly deserve what's happened, and we're all the richer for it."

Jeevak Parpia, physics professor in the same Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, was an undergraduate in Chicago when he heard Lee give a talk about the discovery in 1972. "That's what brought me into the field," he said excitedly. "I heard Dave give a talk, and I thought, that's what I want to do, and there's no place better to do it than at Cornell. This is a very big boost, a recognition of the very fundamental piece of physics that defined a field. This is a big, big moment."

Another big moment came when another of Cornell's Nobel laureates, Roald Hoffmann (1981), the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor in Humane Letters and professor of chemistry, embraced Richardson and then Lee at the party on Thursday. The number of Nobel Prize winners at Cornell had doubled the previous day, as Lee and Richardson joined Hoffmann and Hans A. Bethe (1967), the John Wendell Anderson Professor of Physics Emeritus, who could not attend the party.

Professors Robert Richardson, left, and David Lee hold the large brass rings given to them by two former students in honor of their winning the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics. Behind them, at a party in their honor, is Norm Scott, left, vice president for research and advanced studies, and Dale Corson, president emeritus.

Students and former students also contributed to the festive event to honor their mentors. John Denker, a former doctoral student now at Bell Labs, and Nick Bigelow, another former student, presented Richardson and Lee with large brass rings that were fabricated in the Clark Hall machine shop the night before, signifying that the scientists had just earned the big brass ring that many believe is unreachable.

Doctoral student Brendan Plapp delights the Clark Hall gathering with his singing of "The Nobel Blues" in honor of Lee and Richardson.

Brendan Plapp, a doctoral student, came on stage with guitar and sang "The Nobel Blues" while imitating Lee, much to the delight of the audience.

Also attending was Lee's family. In addition to his wife, Dana, were his son, Eric Lee, who earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1984 and is now an attorney in Binghamton; his daughter-in-law, Lori DiCaprio-Lee, and their daughter, Christina Lee, who turned one month old the day her grandfather won the Nobel Prize.

Douglas Fitchen, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, said the prize was overdue.

"We are delighted at this recognition of something that we knew in the first minutes, or the first few weeks, was a really important discovery," he said. "It is recognition not only of the two professors, but of the work of the graduate student who was the one there doing the experiment late at night."

Mal Kalos, professor of physics and director of the Cornell Theory Center, who also works in low-temperature physics, said there does not have to be a readily apparent application to the discovery.

"It's the web of science," he said. "While there is no current direct application, the contribution to the scientific understanding of things that do have applications is immeasurable."

And no, the balloons decorating the entranceway to 700 Clark Hall were not filled with helium-3 . . . just plain old helium.

'We knew right away we had something big, something important'

Professor Roald Hoffmann, left, the 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry, gives David Lee a congratulatory hug at the Clark Hall party.

By Larry Bernard

Two questions kept dogging Robert C. Richardson and David M. Lee in the days immediately following announcement that they had won the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery 25 years ago of the superfluidity of helium-3:

What would they do with their share of the money ($1.12 million), and what is their discovery good for?

The first one was easy -- pay taxes, set up charitable foundations, maybe fund some research, buy something for the family. But the second question was more difficult. After all, the super-cooled, strange-behaving liquid form of a rare helium isotope is not a discovery that, shall we say, comes readily to most peoples' minds.

"It is true, it's not something you would have lying around your refrigerator," Richardson said. "Dave (Lee) had this crazy plan to squeeze helium enough so that it would cool. It was a ridiculous idea because I thought it would heat, but he hired me and I went along with it. Just to humor him."

The discovery that they made in 1972, with their doctoral student, Douglas D. Osheroff, now a physicist at Stanford University, earned them the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics, announced last week by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

But first, go back to 1958, when David Lee made a visit to Cornell on the Lehigh Valley train from New Haven, Conn. Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus, was chairman of the physics department. The faculty decided that it ought to have a laboratory for low-temperature physics and Corson embarked on a recruiting mission to find someone to work in that area. Lee was a bright young graduate student at Yale University, and he got the job, beginning here as an instructor in 1959 even before he finished his Yale dissertation.

Dale Corson, left, Cornell president emeritus and former chairman of the physics department, congratulates Lee, right, whom he hired in 1958, and Richardson.

"I asked Dale if I could delay it a year so I could finish my thesis, but he told me that I come in February to teach a class, or not at all," Lee recalled.

Lee hired Richardson in 1966 for the express purpose of researching low-temperature physics and, specifically, to find the phase transition -- the point at which solid helium-3 becomes a nuclear magnet. As other labs around the country were doing similar work, the race was on.

"We were going to try everything we could to find it," Richardson said. "And we thought that we had."

What they thought they had discovered was the phase transition in solid helium-3. That was Thanksgiving week, 1971, and Osheroff was using the equipment just to practice the experiment that he would run after the break. But Osheroff, "a brilliant observational scientist," Lee said, noticed tiny little squiggles in the data. He thought they were just glitches and delayed telling his professors about them. But, "he got them every time he ran the experiment. He looked carefully and noticed these wiggles happened at the same pressure every time. That meant there was some kind of change," Richardson said. "These were the signatures of an important phase transition in solid helium-3. At least, we thought that's what it was, and we published it. Of course, it was in the liquid, not the solid."

The first paper, in Physical Review Letters in 1972, was corrected later that year to show that it was the liquid state.

Said Lee: "We knew right away we had something big, something important. It was absolutely exhilarating. From then on, every day for eight months, it seemed, we found something new and exciting."

The next three to five years were full of discovery as labs raced to study the strange, new phenomenon. "We had a rival at UCSD, John Wheatley. He was looking, too. It made it very competitive, and there was a huge amount of research. It was very exciting," Richardson said.

"The other thing was that it provided a great deal of theoretical activity," Lee said. "There was a whole different symmetry here. What we found was another step in the way nature can work."

Superfluid helium-3

But the more rare form of helium, helium-3, could not be converted to a liquid so easily. Lee thought such a conversion could be made by subjecting the helium to high-pressure, which cooled it. For a liquid to become superfluid, the atoms or molecules making up the liquid must be cooled, or "condensed" to the point at which they all occupy the same quantum state (thus the term, "condensed matter physics"). An atom of helium-3 has a nucleus made up of an odd number of particles and is a type of particle known as a fermion. Groups of fermions are not allowed to occupy the same quantum state.

By cooling the liquid to a low enough temperature, helium-3 atoms can pair up. Cooled to about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, helium-3 did in fact become a superfluid. Not only that, but it had magnetic properties and a structure much different from superconductors or helium-4, with these paired atoms.

"From the time superfluid helium-3 was discovered, it has been apparent that it is an even stranger substance than superfluid helium 4 or superconductors," Lee and N. David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics, wrote in a 1976 Scientific American article about the discovery. Its study consumed low-temperature physics researchers across the country for the next 20 years.

Later, in one of three letters Mermin wrote to the Nobel committee in nominating Lee, Richardson and Osheroff for the Nobel Prize, he wrote: "The discovery of the superfluid phases of liquid helium-3 completes the triad of discoveries that collectively constitute the major achievement of low-temperature physics in this century."

Mermin outlined the importance of the find. "The discovery has also played a substantial role in what are arguably the two major new areas of research in condensed matter physics to have developed ... heavy fermions and high temperature superconductivity."

That helium-3 can be a superfluid, Mermin wrote, has "served as an existence proof that it is possible to have superconductivity" in such a material and that it "[opens] the way for the variety of theoretical models that are now being contemplated for these strange materials."

The discovery was quickly embraced by the physics community. Although there was a slight reservation in publishing the first papers on it, physicists soon saw the discovery's importance, and Cornell's role was cemented. Awards began to roll in.

In 1976, Lee, Richardson and Osheroff shared their earliest recognition for studies of superfluidity, the Simon Memorial Prize of the British Physical Society. The Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society followed for the trio in 1981.

Lee was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, both in 1982.

Richardson, now director of Cornell's Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and chaired its Physics Section from 1989 to 1992. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1981, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1982 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1983. In 1993, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.

In addition to having implications for superconductivity, superfluidity of helium-3 showed that nuclear magnetic resonance could work. NMR now is widespread in the medical diagnosis field, also known as magnetic resonance imaging, to see non-invasively inside the body. In recent years, cosmologists have thought that liquid helium-3 may be the stuff cosmic strings, if they exist, are made of. Cosmic strings are immense hypothetical objects thought to play a role in galaxy formation. Rotating neutron stars may exhibit this material as well. If so, it could yield insight into the beginning of the universe.

Or, try the easy answer: "People have been asking me whether it explains something about how the universe began," Richardson said by telephone at the Cornell news conference on Wednesday. "Does it?" asked Douglas Fitchen, the physics department chairman. "Sure!" replied Richardson, barely missing a beat.

Winners: Federal funding is crucial

By Larry Bernard

Five of six Nobel laureates in science for 1996 are in Washington, D.C., today to help tell the story of how federal basic research funding allowed them to break new ground to make their discoveries.

At the invitation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), they are scheduled to meet with media at The Washington Post, National Press Club and National Public Radio, and they will brief the National Science Board on their discoveries.

Cornell's David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, professors of physics, are among the group, in part to describe how the federal government's funding of basic research is critical to future knowledge. The grants that allowed them to discover the superfluidity of helium-3 in 1972 came from the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency -- a Defense Department agency -- through Cornell's Materials Science Center. Douglas Osheroff, who is joining them today in the nation's capital, was a doctoral student in their lab on an NSF fellowship when they made the discovery that earned them this year's Nobel Prize in physics.

Since then, the low-temperature physics laboratory at Cornell has continued to be funded through the NSF, and the Materials Science Center also has been renewed for another five years.

"NSF funding has been and continues to be an essential ingredient in the success of low-temperature research at Cornell," Lee said.

Nobel reactions

"The phone rang and I thought, 'Who on earth would be calling me at this hour of the morning?' I answered the phone and there was this very nice gentleman from Sweden."
-- David M. Lee, Nobel laureate in physics, on receiving word about 5:30 a.m. about the prize.

"I heard from a high-school classmate I last heard from in 1959."
-- Robert C. Richardson, Nobel laureate in physics, on one of the hundreds of congratulatory e-mail messages he received after the announcement.

"I remember seeing Dave (Lee) the morning after the discovery. He said they had been up all night working on it, and that it was going to be really important."
-- Dale Corson, Cornell president emeritus and physics chairman emeritus

"I should point out that the first thing that David Lee did after learning of this award was to teach Physics 213 at 8 a.m. . . . It's another outstanding example of the merging of the interests of teaching and research at a great university and in a great department."
-- Hunter Rawlings, Cornell president

"For some of us it feels as if this award has been fairly long in coming, but we think it has arrived at a very opportune moment."
-- Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

"It's a pleasant reflection on the school that this kind of research is being honored and that everyone is recognizing it."
-- Ilarion Melnikov, sophomore, from Chicago

"Everyone around here was smiling at the same time; this is great. It really adds to the prestige."
-- Scott Johns, grad student, from New Hope, Minn.

"I think it's great that they recognized the graduate student for the work. Graduate students are important to note. That is, everyone who worked on it got credit for it."
-- Robert Schirmer, grad student, from Sacramento, Calif.

"What a boost of energy. This was the most exciting news I've heard, and it's got a lot of people thinking about research."
-- Veronique Boisvert, grad student, from Montreal